This is a commonly known as broken-links problem that is widespread across the content due to non-monitored deletion of articles or sections. So if an article is marked for deletion and is deleted by any reviewer it leaves all the referencing articles to this page's link in a 'broken' state.
It is quite widespread across the board.
Two pronged methodology can be put in place to fix it for good :
- When an article/section of article is deleted , a daemon will go and un-link all the references across articles to this page/section.
- An asynchronous background process will keep on running for 6 months or so , and will scan each page for broken links and remove the references by replacing the link with regular text e.g. [[The Page That is no longer alive]] --> ''The Page That is no longer alive''
It will help clean up of metadata as well aid end-users by providing better user experience. Currently all they get to see is 'Page does not exist' message.
Please evaluate and take it up if you find this meaningful.